Extract

Had we but world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime.

If time were infinite, a lover could spend ten thousand years praising each part of the beloved's body, but time is not infinite, and the grave offers no embraces. Andrew Marvell wrote this poem in the 1650s, though it was not published until 1681, and its three-part argument remains the most elegant seduction in English. First, the fantasy of endless courtship. Then, the brutal reminder of mortality: worms, dust, all beauty collapsed into nothing. Finally, the proposition: let us devour time before it devours us. The verse moves from playful hyperbole through horror to fierce urgency, its couplets tightening like a pulse. Marvell makes desire philosophical, proving that the shortest path to eternity runs through the present moment.